The retail and e-commerce sector faces mounting cybersecurity challenges as we enter 2026, with AI-driven shopping tools and evolving privacy concerns reshaping the threat landscape. According to Kaspersky’s latest data, the industry experienced significant pressure from cybercriminals throughout 2025, with 14.41% of retail users encountering web-based threats and 22.20% affected by on-device attacks.
Ransomware and Phishing Dominate Retail Cybersecurity Threats
Ransomware remains a critical concern for retail cybersecurity in 2026. Last year, 8.25% of retail and e-commerce companies experienced ransomware incidents, with the number of unique B2B users affected by ransomware detections surging by 152% compared to 2023. This dramatic escalation signals increasingly targeted attacks against the sector.
Phishing continues as a major threat vector, with Kaspersky identifying 6.7 million phishing attacks targeting users of online stores, delivery services, and payment systems in 2025. More than half of these attacks (50.58%) specifically targeted online stores, demonstrating cybercriminals’ focus on e-commerce platforms as high-value targets for fraud and data theft.
The growth in ransomware detections was largely attributable to the rapid spread of the Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Dcryptor family, which became highly prevalent across retail and e-commerce sectors. This malware leverages the legitimate DiskCryptor utility to encrypt disk partitions on victim systems, making it particularly dangerous.
AI-Powered Shopping Assistants Create New Privacy Risks
Looking ahead to retail cybersecurity 2026, AI-powered shopping assistants are expected to increasingly operate outside retail platforms, embedding themselves into browsers, mobile apps, and third-party services. While designed to simplify navigation and price discovery, these tools shift data collection beyond the retailer’s perimeter, creating new and less visible privacy risks.
Chatbots are likely to become a common product discovery tool across online marketplaces. Unlike traditional search, conversational interfaces encourage users to share more detailed, natural-language requests, revealing preferences, constraints, and contextual information. This shift expands the privacy attack surface, as platforms accumulate richer user profiles through chat interactions.
“Search itself is changing, including how people look for products online. In 2025, there was a gradual shift from simple keyword queries to more conversational and visual ways of finding what to buy. As these models rely on broader user input, careful handling of the data involved will remain an important consideration for maintaining user trust.”
Anna Larkina, Web Data and Privacy Analysis Expert at Kaspersky
Image-Based Search and Trade Rule Exploitation
Image-based product search is expected to become a routine part of the shopping experience across major retail platforms in 2026. While this feature improves product discovery, it also increases the risk of unintended exposure of personal data. User-submitted images may contain faces, home environments, or sensitive details such as names, phone numbers, or addresses visible on shipping labels or packaging.
Additionally, modifications in taxes, import duties, and cross-border trade rules are likely to be exploited in phishing campaigns and fraudulent online stores, promoting unrealistically cheap offers or claims of avoided fees. As pricing and fee rules continue to evolve across markets, this may lower user vigilance, increasing the effectiveness of such schemes.
Kaspersky experts recommend users guard their privacy with smart tools, verify senders and links before clicking, research stores before purchasing, monitor card transactions regularly, and adopt proactive security approaches using reliable cybersecurity software like Kaspersky Premium. For retail and e-commerce organizations, protecting corporate infrastructure against phishing and ransomware through solutions like Kaspersky Next and managed security services is essential for navigating the evolving threat landscape of 2026.
